[Peace-discuss] Not this August?

[C. G. Estabrook]

The Obama administration and the Pentagon this week are laying the groundwork 
and hinting increasingly openly that extending the war into Pakistan and Iran 
will become regrettably necessary - in order both to stop terrorism and revive 
the US economy.  The only stimulus programs the US government has been able to 
manage is the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich - and the rich are 
manifestly not transferring it back to the poor in the form of jobs or social 
services. The only way out, while maintaining and accelerating the present 
concentration of wealth, is the regimentation of he majority of the population - 
and that has been done in American history only by war emergencies.

"The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes," Mark Twain is supposed to have 
said.  The similarities between America in the current decade and the 1930s have 
frequently been remarked upon.   The following text can be read that way, 
/mutatis mutandis/.  It's a magazine article that Ernest Hemingway published in 
1935 - at the time of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (by "that admirable 
Italian gentleman" Mussolini, as FDR described him in 1933) but before the 
German invasion of Poland, four years later.  (The only copy I can find online 
is garbled, but the sense comes through.)

===========
Not this August, nor this September; you have this year to do in what you like. 
Not next August, nor next September; that is still too soon; they are still too 
prosperous from the way things pick up when armament factories start at near 
capacity; they never fight as long as money can still be made without. So you 
can fish that summer and shoot that fall or do whatever you do, go home at 
nights, sleep with your wife, go to the ball game, make a bet, take a drink when 
you want to, or enjoy whatever liberties are left for anyone who has a dollar or 
a dime. But the year after that or the year after that they fight. Then what 
happens to you?

First you make a lot of money; maybe. There is a chance now that you make 
nothing; that it will be the government that makes it all. That is what, in the 
last analysis, taking the profits out of war means. If you are on relief you 
will be drafted into this great profitless work and you will be a slave from 
that day.

If there is a general European war we will be brought in if propaganda (think of 
how the radio will be used for this), greed, and the desire to increase the 
impaired health of the state can swing us in. Every move that is made now to 
deprive the people of their decision on all matters through their elected 
representatives and to delegate those powers to the executive brings us that 
much nearer war.

It removes the only possible check. No one man nor group of men incapable of 
fighting or exempt from fighting should in any way be given the power, no matter 
how gradually it is given them, to put this country or any country into war.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the 
second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. 
But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

No European country is our friend nor has been since the last war and no country 
but one's own is worth fighting for. Never again should this country be put into 
a European war through mistaken idealism, through propaganda, through the desire 
to back our creditors, or through the wish of anyone through war, notoriously 
the health of the state, to make a going concern out of a mismanaged one.

Now let us examine the present set-up and see what chance there is of avoiding war.

No nations, any more, pay their debts. There is no longer even a pretense of 
honesty between nations or of the nation toward the individual. Finland pays us 
still; but she is a new country and will learn better. We were a new country 
once and we learned better. Now when a country does not pay its debts you cannot 
take its word on anything. So we may discard any treaties or declarations of 
intentions by any countries which do not coincide completely and entirely with 
the immediate and most cynical national aims of those countries.

A few years ago, in the late summer, Italy and France mobilized along their 
border to fight over Italy's desire for colonial expansion in North Africa. All 
references to this mobilization were censored out of cables and radiograms. 
Correspondents who mentioned it in mailed stories were threatened with 
expulsion. That difference has now been settled by Mussolini's shift of ambition 
to East Africa where he has obviously made a deal with the French to abandon his 
North African plans in return for France allowing him to make war on a free 
sovereign state under the protection of membership in the League of Nations.

Italy is a country of patriots and whenever things are going badly at home, 
business bad, oppression and taxation too great, Mussolini has only to rattle 
the sabre against a foreign country to make his patriots forget their 
dissatisfaction at home in their flaming zeal to be at the throats of the enemy. 
By the same system, early in his rule, when his personal popularity waned and 
the opposition was strengthened, an attempted assassination of the Duce would be 
arranged which would put the populace in such a frenzy of hysterical love for 
their nearly lost leader that they would stand for anything and patriotically 
vote the utmost repressive measures against the opposition.

Mussolini plays on their admirable patriotic hysteria as a violinist on his 
instrument but when France and Jugo-Slavia were the possible enemy he could 
never really give them the full Paganini because he did not want war with those 
countries; only the threat of war. He still remembers Caporetto, where Italy 
lost 320,000 men in killed, wounded and missing, of which amount 265,000 were 
missing, although he has trained a generation of young Italians who believe 
Italy to be an invincible military power.

Now he is setting out to make war on a feudal country, whose soldiers fight 
barefooted and with the formations of the desert and the middle ages; he plans 
to use planes against a people who have none and machine guns, flame projectors, 
gas, and modern artillery against bows and arrows, spears, and native cavalry 
armed with carbines. Certainly the stage is as nearly set as it ever can be for 
an Italian victory and such a victory as will keep Italians' minds off things at 
home for a long time. The only flaw is that Abyssinia has a small nucleus of 
trained, well armed troops.

France is glad to see him fight. In the first place anyone who fights may be 
beaten; Italy's Black Caporetto, her second greatest military debacle, was 
administered by these same Ethiopians at Adowa when fourteen thousand Italian 
troops were killed or driven from the field by a force which Mussolini now 
describes as 100,000 Ethiopians. Certainly it is unfair to ask fourteen thousand 
troops to fight one hundred thousand but the essence of war is not to confront 
your force of fourteen thousand with a hundred thousand of anything. Actually 
the Italians lost more than 450o white and 2000 native troops, killed and 
wounded. Sixteen hundred Italians were taken prisoners. The Abyssinians admitted 
losing 3000 men.

The French remember Adowa and less possibly though more recently, Baer and 
Braddock (who knows but what Owney Madden may have bought a piece of the 
Ethiopians?), and they know that anybody who fights may be beaten. Dysentery, 
fever, the sun, bad transport, many things can defeat an army. There are also a 
number of tropical diseases which can only become epidemic when given the 
opportunity afforded by an invading army of men unused to the climate and 
possessing no immunity against them. Anyone who fights near the equator can be 
beaten by the mere difficulty of keeping an army in the field.

Then France feels that if Italy wins or loses, the war will cost her so much 
that she will be in no position to make trouble in Europe. Italy has never been 
a serious problem unless she has allies, because she has no coal and no iron. No 
nation can make war without coal and iron. Lately Italy has tried to overcome 
this by building up an enormous air-force and it is her air-force that makes her 
the threat she is in Europe today.

England is glad to see Italy fight Ethiopia. First she may be whipped which, 
they figure, will teach her a lesson and lengthen the peace of Europe. Secondly 
if she wins that removes the annoyance of Abyssinian raids along the northern 
frontier province of Kenya and gives someone else the responsibility of 
suppressing the perennial Abyssinian slave trade across to Arabia. Next England 
must undoubtedly have an arrangement with the possible victor about the water 
project in north-eastern Ethiopia which she has long coveted for the watering of 
the Sudan. It is only logical that Anthony Eden should have arranged about that 
when he was in Rome recently. Lastly she knows that anything Italy finds and 
brings out of Ethiopia must come through the Suez Canal or, taking the long way 
around, the straits of Gibraltar, while if Japan had been permitted to penetrate 
into Ethiopia and thus gain a foothold in Africa what she took would go direct 
to Japan and in time of necessity there would be no control over it.

Germany is glad to have Mussolini try to gobble Ethiopia. Any change in the 
African status quo provides an opening for her soon-to-be-made demands for 
return of her African colonial possessions. This return, if made, will probably 
delay war for a long time. Germany, under Hitler, wants war, a war of revenge, 
wants it fervently, patriotically and almost religiously. France hopes that it 
will come before Germany is too strong. But the people of France do not want war.

There is the great danger and the great difference. France is a country and 
Great Britain is several countries but Italy is a man, Mussolini, and Germany is 
a man, Hitler. A man has ambitions, a man rules until he gets into economic 
trouble; he tries to get out of this trouble by war. A country never wants war 
until a man through the power of propaganda convinces it. Propaganda is stronger 
now than it has ever been before. Its agencies have been mechanized, multiplied 
and controlled until in a state ruled by any one man truth can never be presented.

War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is 
made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the 
patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of 
war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they 
misrule. And we in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how 
gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into 
a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the 
premeditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive 
you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's 
country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You 
will die like a dog for no good reason. Hit in the head you will die quickly and 
cleanly even sweetly and fittingly except for the white blinding flash that 
never stops, unless perhaps it is only the frontal bone or your optic nerve that 
is smashed, or your arm carried away, or your nose and cheek bones gone so you 
can still think but you have no face to talk with. But if you are not hit in the 
head you will be hit in the chest, and choke in it, or in the lower belly, and 
feel it all slip and slide loosely as you open, to spill out when you try to get 
up, it's not supposed to be so painful but they always scream with it, it's the 
idea I suppose, or have the flash, the Jamming clang of high explosive on a hard 
road and find your legs both gone above the knee, or maybe just below the knee, 
or maybe just a foot gone and watch the white bone sticking through your puttee, 
or watch them take a boot off with your foot a mush inside it, or feel an arm 
flop and learn how a bone feels grating, or you will burn, choke and vomit, or 
be blown to hell a dozen ways, without sweetness or fittingness; but none of 
this means anything. No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the 
war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you .will die, brother, if 
you go to it long enough.

The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations 
that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way 
they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would 
a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.

If war was fought by those who wanted to fight it and knew what they were doing 
and liked it, or even understood it, then it would be defensible. But those who 
want to go to the war, the élite, are killed off in the first months and the 
rest of the war is fought by men who are enslaved into the bearing of arms and, 
are taught to be more afraid of sure death from their officers if they run than 
possible death if they stay in the line or attack. Eventually their steadily 
increasing terror overcomes them, given the proper amount of bombardment and a 
given intensity of fire, and they all run and, if they get far enough out of 
hand, for that army it is over. Was there any allied army which did not, sooner 
or later, run during the last war? There is not room here to list them.

No one wins a modern war because it is fought to such a point that everyone must 
lose. The troops that are fighting at the end are incapable of winning. It is 
only a question of which government rots the first or which side can get in a 
new ally with fresh troops. Sometimes the allies are useful. Sometimes they are 
Rumania.
In a modern war there is no Victory. The allies won the war but the regiments 
that marched in triumph were not the men who fought the war. The men who fought 
the war were dead. More than seven million of them were dead and it is the 
murder of over seven million more that an ex-corporal in the German army and an 
ex-aviator and former morphine addict drunk with personal and military ambition 
and fogged in a blood-stained murk of misty patriotism look forward hysterically 
to today. Hitler wants war in Europe as soon as he can get it. He is an 
ex-corporal and he will not have to fight in this one; only to make the 
speeches. He himself has nothing to lose by making war and everything to gain.

Mussolini is an ex-corporal, too, but he is also an ex-anarchist, a great 
opportunist, and a realist. He wants no war in Europe. He will bluff in Europe 
but he never means to fight there. He can still remember what the war was like 
himself and how he left it after being wounded in an accident with an Italian 
trench mortar and went back to newspaper work. He does not want to fight in 
Europe because he knows that anyone who fights may lose, unless of course one 
can arrange to fight Rumania, and the first dictator who provokes a war and 
loses it puts a stop to dictators, and their sons, for a long time.

Because the development of his regime calls for a war he chooses Africa as the 
place to fight and the only surviving free African state as his opponent. The 
Abyssinians unfortunately are Christians so it cannot be a Holy war. But while 
he is making Ethiopia Fit for Fiats he can, of course, suppress slavery on 
paper, and doubtless in the Italian War College, it looks like a foolproof, 
quick and ideal campaign. But it may be that a regime and a whole system of 
government will fall because of this foolproof war in less than three years.

A German colonel named Von Lettow-Vorbeck with an original force of 5000 troops, 
only two hundred and fifty of whom were whites, fought 160,000 allied troops for 
a period of over four years in Tanganyika and Portuguese Africa and caused the 
expenditure of 72,000,000 pounds sterling. At the end of the war he was still at 
large carrying on guerrilla warfare.

If the Abyssinians choose to fight on in guerrilla warfare rather than make 
peace Italy may find that Ethiopia will be an unhealing wound in her side that 
will drain away her money, her youth and her food supplies and return men broken 
in health and disgusted with suffering and the government that sent them to 
suffer with promises of glory. It is the disillusioned soldiers who overthrow a 
regime.

It may be that this war in Africa will prolong the temporary peace in Europe. In 
the meantime something may happen to Hitler. But of the hell broth that is 
brewing in Europe we have no need to drink. Europe has always fought, the 
intervals of peace are only Armistices. We were fools to be sucked in once on a 
European war and we should never be sucked in again.

--Ernest Hemingway, "Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter."  Esquire: 
September 1935 <http://www.fullposter.com/snippets.php?snippet=139>.

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